Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Making Sure to Stay #CyberSafe #sponsored

“I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. I received a promotional item as a thank you for participating.”

June is National Internet Safety Month so what better time to explain to your kids about being cyber safe? When I was a young girl, my parents got me my first computer. That was back when AOL was the big thing so I set up an account and started emailing with my friends. It was great at first until I had a problem one day and contacted an AOL representative to help me. After they helped with the problem, they emailed me and asked if I wanted to keep talking. Since I was only about ten years old and this was an official AOL rep, I thought it would be a good idea just in case I had a problem again. But that's not what he wanted to talk about. He then started instant messaging me, asking questions like "What I was wearing" and "Could you send pictures of yourself?"

This really scared me so I blocked him, but I never told anyone. After that incident, I started getting messages from another person in England that was asking me if I liked to work on the computer naked. This seriously scared me so I blocked everyone from contacting me except for kids my own age.

So a few weeks went by and then I got an invite from a ten year old kid that lived in Chicago who asked if they wanted to talk. Since they were a "kid", I said yes because I had no idea what internet safety was back then. After months of talking, he started wanting to call me on the phone. When I gave him my phone number, only he would call once in a while. But the one time I tried to call him back, an old man picked up the phone. And that's when I finally told my parents everything that had happened.

After that, my parents called the police and found out it was an old man that was using a child to call me and pretend to be a little boy! So that's why when Mary uses the computer, she uses it while I am present in the room and has ultimate safety locks on her accounts.

The internet is a very scary place, more so now then when I was a kid, so I take every precaution. Back then, my parents didn't know anything about computers at all so they explained internet safety to me at all. But now that I know, I make sure to tell Mary to be safe in everything she does.

Did you know that one in three parents believe their kids are more tech savvy then they are? If you feel like this, why not check out this easy quiz that the Boys and Girls Club made! And I encourage all of you to check out Cyber Safe Futures to learn more about being cyber safe.

I'm a little late for CyberSafe month but I want to agree with everything in this article. Parents MUST have all their kids passwords and monitor them closely. You'd watch your kids closely in a crowded mall-why would you do anything less on the internet? Some would call it snooping- I'd call it being a parent. (steps off soapbox)